

- #FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX HOW TO#
- #FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX MAC OS#
- #FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX DRIVERS#
- #FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX SOFTWARE#
- #FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX PC#
Of course, it's good if you're planning to sell your Seagate external hard drive. And there's absolutely no way to recover the data once it's gone.

Please note: Reformating means that all the data you stored inside your Seagate external hard drive will be deleted permanently. Whether you're using Mac or Windows, this method will work perfectly. Because on this article, I'll show you the easiest, fastest, and the safest way to reformat a Seagate external hard drive.

If you're using Seagate external hard drive and you want to reformat your Seagate external hard drive, then you came to the right place. And it has super large storage up to 8TB. The reason is perhaps that Seagate external hard drive has been well known for a long time as one of the most reliable drives for storing data.
#FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX HOW TO#
The drive can be completely empty and still not have room for the file - it simply cannot handle a file of that size.įor a bit more info on how to format a hard drive check out our knowledge center.A lot of people including you, storing important data on Seagate external hard drive instead of on your PC/Mac hard drive. That would lead you to believe that the drive is full. The error message that gets reported if you try to copy a file larger than 4GB onto the drive is misleading - it says that there is not enough room for the file. There’s one significant limitation to this though - a FAT32 formatted drive cannot take a file larger than 4GB. This format gives you the ability to very easily move a drive between the two compute platforms. So on a Windows PC, you can read and write to a FAT formatted drive. The one simple benefit of the FAT format today is that it can be read from and written to by either of the operating systems discussed here. Most forms of removable media (memory cards for digital cameras, flash drives, etc) use the FAT format, as the capacity of most of these devices is significantly smaller than hard drives, and the more robust formats of the two predominant operating systems is not required. (For more information on FAT formats check out ) FAT has several forms and variations, the most recent of which is FAT32. There is yet a third drive format that CAN be used across these two operating systems without the need for special third party drivers.
#FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX SOFTWARE#
The Mac, on the other hand, can read an NTFS formatted drive - it just can’t write to it (again, unless you use a third party software driver).
#FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX DRIVERS#
(I should note here that there are several third party software drivers on the market that will allow either OS to read and write the other’s formats - but not all functionality is supported, and they both reduce performance when going through such an application) While Windows can read and write to NTFS formatted drives, it can neither write nor read to a drive that has been formatted HFS+. Interoperability - Now for the confusing part: what drive formats work with what OSs. For a hard drive to be used with Time Machine (Mac OS X 10.5 and later), the drive must be formatted in HFS+ Journaled (Journaled adds an extra element to the standard HFS+ format). This is the required format for a bootable Mac hard drive. This format was optimized to minimize the amount of drive storage space used for a single file (the previous version used sectors loosely, leading to rapidly lost drive space).
#FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX MAC OS#
Mac - Since Mac OS 8.1, the Mac has been using a format called HFS+ - also known as Mac OS Extended format.
#FORMAT MY SEAGATE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC FOR WINDOWS AND OSX PC#
If you have a Windows PC (NT on, including Windows 7), then your system drive is most likely formatted in the NTFS format. This is the format that is used with all current versions of Windows. Windows - With the advent of Windows NT, Microsoft moved their optimized drive format to something called NTFS (New Technology File System). One is for Windows, one is for Mac, and one crosses the two (but with its own limitations). NTFS, HFS+, FAT - These are the primary formats that are in use today by PC users. So I thought I’d present a short primer on the formats hard drives use with and between these two primary operating systems. I get this question about once a year from my father-in-law. When you work for a storage solutions company you get a lot of questions from people about hard drive formats - especially about which formats are compatible across the most common operating system platforms, Windows and Mac.
